Meal Sharing

Meal Recovery Program

During the semester we recover food from True Grits and bring pre-portioned meals back to The Essential Space.

Save-A-Swipe Program

The deadline to donate meals has closed and opens in the first month of each semester.
Save-A-Swipe creates a pool of meals that become available to UMBC students who have been identified by trained staff as experiencing food insecurity.

Students on a meal plan can now enroll to donate one meal a week (5 or 10 meals per semester) to a shared pool during the open donation window. Those meals will be distributed to students in need through Counseling Services to be used in True Grit’s.

During the semester, we collect meal swipe donations that students can apply for. Once submitted, a student will then have an intake meeting with a social work intern to determine how many meals to allocate to their student ID card. The social work intern will also walk them through local resources and can provide SNAP assistance.

Donate meals to Save-A-Swipe

If you are in need of meals, email retrieveressentials@umbc.edu to be assisted.

Share Meals

Where is free food on campus? Find out with Share Meals!
A simple way to share food and reduce waste on campus.
We’ve partnered with Share Meals, a free app that helps connect free food with hungry people on campus. There’s often extra food leftover after meetings, events, or programs. Instead of letting that food go to waste, you can post on Share Meals and redistribute it in real time. At Retriever Essentials, we think about campus resources through a systems lens. Food insecurity and food waste often exist in the same system, and tools like Share Meals help us close that loop by making it easy to act quickly when food is available.

How it works:

  1. UMBC users post free food
  2. Anyone with notifications turned on will get an alert about where food is, what’s available, and how long it’ll be there
  3. Community members come pick up within the time limit, while supplies last.

It’s simple! When one person shares, the whole community benefits.

Get the App:

Download Share Meals and join the UMBC Community. When signing up, use your umbc.edu email address to automatically get connected to our campus community. Once signed up, opt-in to push notifications so you can get alerts when food is posted.

Download Share Meals and join the UMBC Community. When signing up, use your umbc.edu email address to automatically get connected to our campus community. Once signed up, opt-in to push notifications so you can get alerts when food is posted.